The Eel's Tale (2025)

Exhibition history 2026 East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, Norwich, UK (group); 2025 Standard Quay, Faversham, UK (solo); Canterbury Festival, Canterbury, UK (screening); FormaHQ, London, UK (group)

Drawing upon the radical structure and spirit of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, The Eel’s Tale is a multi-species portrait of the lives found in Kent’s wetlands.

Tracing the life cycle of the European eel, and its elusive presence in the Kent’s waterways, the film explores how a creature defined by its journeys across national borders, changing environments, and bodily transformation can redefine how we understand our place in the world. Considering the boundaries that separate us from each other, the land, and our multispecies kin, the film asks: “Are we free to move?”

*The Eel’s Tale’s first narrator, wildlife conservationist Matthew Hatchwell, is shown at night with a headtorch describing his first sighting of the tiny glass eels arriving into the creek at Faversham after their 4,000 mile journey across the Atlantic from the Sargasso Sea, only to be eaten by a large adult eel before they have had chance to grow into adults themselves. This more-than-human violence, committed ‘by one of their own’, echoes across the wider film’s questions of migration, bodily autonomy and habitat conservation, poetically explored through shifting footage of the North Kent Marshes. The figure of an eel, carved as a wooden marionette, is used to thread the film’s different stories together. This artistic practice of marionette making is included on the Red List of Endangered Heritage Crafts, echoing the eel’s status as an endangered species, which has seen a 95% population decline due to habitat destruction, migration barriers, overfishing, pollution, and climate change.

As the wooden eel floats through the reed beds so, too, does the question of who is free to move in this landscape and with what constraints. The question of migration and freedom of movement are particularly charged in the context of Faversham, which has seen the rise of anti-immigration rallies directed at the residence for unaccompanied refugee children[2]. We hear about the challenges of immigration and finding a sense of belonging from the second speaker in the film, Dre Spisto, who discovers a sense of home in the water of the estuary through wild swimming, and in their movement practice, which embodies a desire to become ‘as wild as possible’. Alongside the eel’s journey across national boundaries and man-made barriers, the film narrates the creature’s mysterious life cycle and its metamorphosis from larvae into small glass eel, from adolescent yellow eel into adult silver eel. The process of bodily transformation also resonates with Dre’s narration of their gender identity and the experience of their body changing as they age. Again, the eel serves as a symbol of nature’s fluidity: the Anguilla anguilla is born sexually undifferentiated and their sex only becomes apparent at a later stage in their life cycle.

In a moment where migrants and trans lives are being increasingly excluded from social and political life, the eel’s global journey and bodily transformation, which the species has enacted for millions of years, offers a counternarrative to biological determinism and nationalism.*

Extract from an essay by Declan Wiffen

The Eel’s Tale has been commissioned by Cement Fields and FLAMIN (Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network) for the The Open Road – a series of new artists moving image works reimagining the age-old tale of a journey taken, weaving together new stories loosely inspired by The Canterbury Tales.

The Open Road is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, The Amelia Scott, Cement Fields, FLAMIN, Forma, and Three Rivers. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.